The Little Rock School Board on Thursday delayed a vote on a proposed contract with district custodians, heeding the advice of Superintendent Dexter Suggs who said he wanted the tentative agreement to first be proofread and errors corrected.
The call for a final version of the proposed contract - already ratified by the custodians earlier this year - generated a lot of questions from the School Board members and, ultimately, a threat of a lawsuit from the Little Rock Education Association, which represents the custodians.
“My recommendation is that the board not approve the document in its current form,” Suggs said, adding that a corrected final document will be ready for the board to consider at its May 8 meeting.
“We have contacted our attorney and we are going to go after them for negotiating in bad faith,” Little Rock Education Association President Cathy Koehler said immediately after the meeting.
The association is the union that represents teachers and other employee groups in contract negotiations with the school district.
At issue Thursday was whether the School Board can rightly vote on a version of the contract that is in any way different than the version the custodians had already approved - without the changed document being sent back to the negotiating teams and the ratification process restarted.
Teresa Gordon, the vice president of the association and April’s ex officio teacher member of the School Board, told the board that employee groups and the School Board have historically ratified a draft agreement. The ratified agreement is then sent to an editing committee of union and district representatives to be finalized and copies printed for the employees.
Gordon also said that the custodians voted on a version of the tentative agreement that was sent to them by Robert Robinson, who was the district’s chief negotiator in the bargaining with the association.
Robinson said he sent a marked-up version of the tentative agreement to the association for corrections in wording and verification of its accuracy in reflecting the agreements reached at the table. He said it was not for a ratification vote.
“You certainly would not circulate a document with that many errors and questions in it for ratification,” he said in an interview after the meeting. “That wouldn’t be professional.”
Robinson offered assurances that a final, clean draft would not include any language that would be contrary to the original intent of the negotiated tentative agreement.
School Board member C.E. McAdoo made a motion during the meeting to ratify the draft copy but withdrew it after Suggs told the board that he has no problem with the terms of the tentative agreement.
“After reviewing the document, we support the custodians 100 percent,” Suggs said. “We want our custodians to have the agreement. We think it is important, but we just want the opportunity to present it in its final format.
“We are an educational institution,” he continued. “We do not want to present to you anything in a draft format. The only thing we want is to have the opportunity to put it in a nice package, in a final format, for you all to approve.”
Koehler said after the meeting that the draft sent to the association didn’t come with qualifications.
“They sent us a document. It did not say it was for us to read and edit,” she said. “We’re done. There is no going back to the table at this point. Most likely we’ll be suing the board for negotiating in bad faith.”
Also on Thursday, the board approved job changes for two principals. Henderson Middle School Principal Steve Geurin will become an assistant principal at McClellan High. Richard Mills, now the principal at Geyer Springs Elementary School, will be the coordinator of the Rockefeller Elementary early childhood education center.
Arkansas, Pages 12 on 04/25/2014